Oils and hydrocarbons as a class lack a singular, direct stoichiometric functionality, which renders them not amenable to separation processes based on specific reactive functionalities. Therefore, separation methods for these compositions dating back millennia have relied on broad general properties, such as their relative buoyancy in relation to water, resulting in a variety of gravity based separation technologies, including those based on centrifuges, underflow weirs, parallel and inclined plate separators, and on porous and non-porous materials the surfaces of which are employed to force smaller droplets into more buoyant larger droplets. The other primary method for separation for this group of compositions has been the use of adsorptive surfaces, which rely on the mutual attraction of these compositions for said surfaces, driven by weak molecular interactions such as Van der Waals forces. The present invention exploits a common trait of this broad category of compositions, namely, their tendency to self-assemble based on cohesion to each other due to the organizing tendency of hybridized pi-orbitals.
In the present inventor's U.S. Pat. No. 6,180,010, it is disclosed that the compositions described in the inventor's U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,437,793; 5,698,139; 5,837,146; and 5,961,823, (all of which disclosures are hereby incorporated by reference in their entireties) have extremely strong affinities for the aforementioned contaminants in water; and that such compositions can not only be used to directly agglomerate oil spills and the like in bodies of water, but further, that when aqueous streams containing these noxious contaminants are passed through filtration media incorporating these compositions, the contaminants are immobilized at the media, as a result of which concentration levels of the contaminants in the filtrate may be reduced to very low values. Still further, in the inventor's U.S. Pat. No. 6,805,727 (the disclosure of which is hereby incorporated by reference in its entirety), it was found that the said compositions may be used in infused filtration media to remove noxious hydrocarbons and oils, as well as other finely suspended liquid and solid particulates and aerosols, which are dispersed in air or other benign gases. The said prior art absorption composition (referred to herein for convenience as the “PAAC”) generally comprised a homogeneous thermal reaction product of an first reactant selected from the group consisting of glycerides, fatty acids, alkenes and alkynes, and a methacrylate or acrylate polymer component. Most commonly, the first reactant in the previous invention was a commercially available drying oil (comprised of poly-unsaturated glyceride esters of fatty acids containing one or more double bonds, in which at least two of the fatty acids contain conjugated double bonds). These glycerides, such as linseed oil or tung oil, may be derived from animal or vegetable sources. The polymer component can be derived from alpha and beta unsaturated carbonyl compounds.